This is academic slang. The “oak” is a closed door.
Howdy y’all 
Yea how are you supposed to prove it when someone verbally says it. What do I have a recorder or something on play 24/7 LOL
I’m much more careful about being around female coworkers. I’m more formal. No small talk, no casual conversation. I try to have group meetings now. One on one regardless of gender is just too risky.
It’s unfortunate but that’s the world we live in today.
We still do group lunches because a lot of work gets done. We talk about projects and how they’ll get completed. We used to meet with only one or two staff. Not any more. Only groups of 4 or more.
It does limit our employees. It’s hard to rely on people that you’ve never gotten to know.
A lot of changes were made after our required sensitivity training workshops. Age, gender and race are minefields that you must carefully navigate.
Sez you.
I work in a female-dominated profession. If I tried shenanigans like yours, I’d be lucky to keep my job, let alone ever have the opportunity for meaningful career growth or collaboration.
But that ain’t how it works. I have one-on-one informal meetings with my colleagues all the time, and there’s never the whisper of a hint of impropriety, because we’re professionals.
Years ago, I had some different experiences. Once I was meeting with two female colleagues about a certification I was going for, and they had boxes of files from when they’d gone through the certification, and they started joking with each other: “Wow, look at the size of your box! Your box is so pretty! I’d love to get into your box!” It was dumb sex humor, but kind of uncomfortable for me. I laughed along, and you best believe I didn’t make any comments about their boxes.
Another colleague made a series of comments about how our principal loved to hire guys, but she’d say things like, “The main requirement for new hires is that they have penises” and the like. After a few times, I said to her something like, “Hey, it kind of sounds like you’re saying I’m not qualified, and I don’t really like that, I think I was hired for more than my sex.” She was taken aback, apologized, and never made another comment like that.
My takeaways:
- It’s easier for me to laugh off comments or confront comments, because even though it’s a female-dominated profession, it’s in a male-dominated society. I don’t have to worry that I’ll face sexual violence or career repercussions.
- I’m still friends with all of the colleagues I mentioned, because they responded to my concerns when I raised them, and they never did anything egregious. Dudes, take a hint: respond to concerns when they’re raised, and never do anything egregious.
Most of our policies were made after sensitivity training workshops. Our trainers recommended group meetings. We were cautioned about casual banter and jokes.
No one was being unprofessional. Risqué jokes disappeared from our offices 20 years ago. We’re even more cautious now. It’s too easy to lose a career.
Its a workplace culture issue, and workplace culture does not develop organically: it’s established at the top.
When the US military saw its mission as conducting prompt and sustained combat operations, and anything besides that as touchy-feely bullshit, issues like rape and racist attacks were ignored and those reporting it persecuted. Only when heat came down from above were any improvements made.
I have always tried to treat women in the office exactly the same as men. No comments on dress, no hugs, no sexist jokes (with the men, either), etc. That said, there is no way I could avoid responding to them internally as women. One year, I had a post-doc. I knew she was quite attractive; how could I not. Then one warm day in late spring she came in wearing a blouse that, well, showed an awful lot lf cleavage. My eyes popped. I am sure she noticed it, but neither of us said a word and we went back to our usual relationship. It was purely involuntary on my part and she never wore that blouse to the office again.
My office door was always open when I was in it.
I once wrote a joint paper with a woman who was stunningly beautiful. There was no way I could fail to notice it although I never said a word about it. Interestingly, she always dressed in the dowdiest way possible.
My daughter is married to a man she met at work, so there must have been some non-work interaction between them. Although they didn’t get serious until after she left.
Ayup.
The way I always looked at this issue:
- Be the kind of person who – if accused – everybody you know or ever knew would jump to your defense and say – emphatically and unequivocally – “Him ? Never. Doesn’t sound At All like him.”
- Don’t say or do anything that you wouldn’t want somebody saying or doing to your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter.
It’s the place you work in not the world we live in. I have absolutely no problem engaging in banter or casual conversations with women at my company from young women starting their careers to vice presidents in their 60s. But the corporate culture where I work encourages us to get to know other people. Which actually helps me do my job as people are comfortable contacting me when they need something and I’m comfortable contacting them when I need something.
Nobody wants you to be afraid of engaging in casual small talk at work.
Speaking as a late-fifties decidedly no longer young woman: Buddy, we were always angry at the constant shitstream of systemic sexism we had to cope with in workplaces and everywhere else. We were just afraid of the possible consequences of letting that be seen, so we suppressed it. If the young women of today no longer feel so obligated to hide such anger, that’s excellent progress and I applaud it.
If you’re a young woman in a traditionally and persistently sexist society, you pretty much can’t help being angry. Yes, things are in many ways a lot better now than they were fifty years ago. And no, women shouldn’t be taking out their general anger at sexism on individual male colleagues who aren’t mistreating them.
But if awareness of that anger in general is getting some formerly oblivious men to really think about their interaction style with their colleagues, and to refrain from unthinkingly making routine remarks that come across as overly personal or patronizing, then everybody wins.
That is just as unprofessional and inappropriate as men putting up cheesecake calendars (although of course it doesn’t have anywhere near the same impact in terms of creating a hostile work environment, since there isn’t any agelong tradition of incessantly denigrating men as mere pretty faces and sex objects who shouldn’t expect to be treated respectfully in a serious workplace).
Those women should be in unpleasant meetings with HR about those calendars too.
Well, I couldn’t “avoid” women at work. Most places I’ve worked at have women at all levels so I’d look like a weirdo if I avoided them.
Only 15% of my class at MIT was women, about 50 years ago. I knew some who came across as angry. I’m amazed that more didn’t. I can just imagine the shit that women who were interested in science and math got back then. It was bad enough being a man in a lot of places, long before being geeky was considered cool.
I don’t know how many women were angry but learned not to show it.
Just on this point, I have always been a tad confusing gender wise (I am a somewhat masculine leaning woman) but after a recent illness and weight loss every one who doesn’t actually know me is absolutely certain I am a fella. I am touched all the time even in COVID no handshake times. I hate it but it is rather fascinating and it is much more than women do strangers, or maybe women just don’t touch butch women?
I recently had a bus driver slap me on the back as we boarded, I am constantly being grabbed if people want my attention even if just to pass me by. I have to remember how they see me and it isn’t a prelude to an assault or my knee would be forcefully in groins several times a day.
Touch is really, really culture-specific. There’s very little touching among men in my friend group, but I know other men touch one another a lot more. I tend to think that the cultural variation in what constitutes acceptable touching means that extending the benefit of the doubt is reasonable. Obviously that doesn’t extend to unwanted sexual advances, and it super doesn’t extend to groping disguised as social touch. And if someone is uncomfortable with a hug or hand on the arm or handshake or whatever, and expresses that discomfort, any pushing of boundaries is extra fucked up.
I do live in a “landing suburb”, most men I am referring to are recent arrivals to Australia with little English although the “bogans” (our version of rednecks) get in on it as well, I suspect as a repulsive white solidarity thing, I worry most about them realising I am actually a woman and reacting poorly.
In many cases we weren’t even fully conscious of the anger or able to clearly identify its causes: we repressed it as well as suppressed it. We internalized the notion that getting upset or irritated about anything but actual physical assault or explicit insults made us “oversensitive” and “emotional”.
Also, society didn’t have the vocabulary back then to articulate a lot of these distinctions. You can’t fully understand what you can’t name, and having names for specific phenomena really helps you see what’s going on.
I still remember very clearly how slowly and hesitantly I first figured out the problem with what today would now be called a “microaggression”, which took place more than a quarter-century ago. A highly respected and very senior (and also nice! Not a bad guy! I knew that!) male colleague was giving a talk about a historical artifact from medieval Bavaria with decoration depicting a female personification of Urania or Science or something like that. And he remarked in passing something about her being “quite unattractive, like Bavarian women in general.”
That just kinda bugged me, and I couldn’t figure out why, but it didn’t make me un-bugged. My clumsy and hesitant internal dialogue went something like this:
Yuck, that remark about the Bavarian women was sexist.
Why? Why should it bother me? I’m not a Bavarian woman, I don’t look like that sculpture, there weren’t any Bavarian women there to be insulted. What do I care?
But, like, that’s just his opinion that those women are unattractive.
So? Isn’t he allowed to have his opinion about which ethnicities of women he finds attractive or unattractive? Is it sexist just because a guy has his preferences?
Not that, but, he shouldn’t have said it in the talk.
Why not? Because I was there and I’m a woman? I can’t go around demanding that men censor what they say in front of me, that would just cause me all kinds of problems and you haven’t even come up with any reason why it was sexist or he shouldn’t have said it.
It’s just that… it didn’t even have anything to do with what he was talking about. Stuff you say in a talk is supposed to be relevant to the context.
So, maybe he thought it was relevant, why not?
But, why?..
…
It’s, like, the only reason you would think it was relevant to mention your opinion of female attractiveness in that context is if you believe that there’s NO context where your opinion of female attractiveness is NOT relevant. Like in any possible situation it’s open season for commenting on women’s looks.
…Well, yeah.
And isn’t that sexist?
Yeah, I guess it kind of is.
It’s challenging to articulate that the way I actually thought about it at the time without anachronistically inserting a lot of modern terminology from the way I think about it now! But I still remember how difficult it was to wrap my head around the issue and the “aha!” moment of realizing that yes, it does make sense for me to be bugged about this, and this is why.
What it’s doing is getting us to think “So-and-so is a bitch” and just avoiding them completely (even in a professional context, as much as possible) which isn’t helpful. The thing is, these young women seem angry at everything, and it’s coming across as general bitchiness and unpleasantness even when it’s totally unwarranted (ie, directed at everyone, including people who aren’t being sexist boors or acting like a real life Stan Smith).
In some places I’ve worked, the HR ladies (and it’s always ladies in HR where I’ve worked) have those calendars up too. It doesn’t bother or offend me - it’s a buff dude with no shirt, same as you’d see at the beach - but more the double standard that very mildly irks me in a “I might vent about it on the internet but it’s not actually something that bothers me enough to address in real life” sense.
Kindly leave me out of your “us,” tyvm.
Edit: and not to speak for Kimstu, but she was talking about “formerly oblivious men,” and I’m not sure you were one of the folks she was talking about.
Yup, I can see how you would think that. You’ve spent most of your professional (and other) life in a world where it’s taken for granted that young women will be complaisant and friendly towards older men making chatty conversation about their shirt or their reading matter or their gadgets, so that kind of conversation must automatically be just fine, and any young woman who isn’t friendly and complaisant about it must just be a bitch.
And in that world, older men (well, white ones, at least), not young women, are the ones who get to define the categories about what’s okay and what’s not okay and who’s being inappropriate versus who’s being a bitch. So yes, it’s not surprising that your reaction to this situation is just to write off the women’s behavior as wrong.
(Although, pro tip: if you’re getting this reaction from “so many” young women, there’s a chance that the problem is not them, or at least not exclusively them. You know the saying, “If one person you meet is an asshole, then you met an asshole, but if everybody you meet is an asshole, then you’re the asshole.”)
It’s okay to be irked at double standards, and it’s okay to articulate in a constructive way what it is about them that irks you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with your saying to a female HR staffer something like “You know, your having a beefcake calendar in the office makes me a bit uncomfortable, not because I think there’s anything wrong with your appreciating buff dudes, but because I don’t think a guy would get away with putting up a similar calendar with women on it in the office. If a new guy saw your calendar and thought it would be fine to put up a cheesecake calendar in the office, wouldn’t he get in some trouble for it? And wouldn’t that be kind of unfair?”
Those of us who have now become the senior people ourselves have a responsibililty to figure out these issues to make life easier for the younger folks (of whatever gender) coming up, IMHO.